Running Wild Press | 2025

Excerpt from “Circle Ceremonies”

The weather had warmed. He came out to the porch in knee-length shorts and a shirt that hung loose from the shoulders. Barefoot. The screen door hissed, clicked closed behind him. The brisk air, a holdover from night, goose-bumped his legs. The crickets were already loud. The birds too.
He stood taking in the lightening sky. Then grabbed a broom resting in a corner of railing and swept the porch (striped blond where he’d replaced disintegrating planks). He handled the broom meticulously, patiently, as if revealing an ancient mosaic stroke by stroke.
Sometimes he couldn’t do it—scour into nonexistence the leaves and insect husks and whatever else the wind had deposited. A quotidian mystery of chance arrangements. An alluring asymmetry. (The Chinese, Gil said, had a word for it.) Sometimes, though, he was taken with the wood itself. The purity of an unbroken surface.
With a deft movement, he whisked the desiccated debris onto the stairs. Swept those clean too.
He leaned the broom in its corner, gazed out on fields stretching to a tree line. Beyond that, wooded hills. Not a neighbor nearer than a quarter mile.
Wind chimes tinkled.
Nothing much happened here, but the sky was different every day. The air. The Earth’s mood. His. Last night the Moon was obscured by tatters of dark cloud. Witchy. This morning it was faint, chalky. A round world magically afloat over the hills.
Yesterday evening he’d brought a transistor radio out to the porch, listened to the news. Then a country station. White man’s blues, Billy said, like he was aiming a dart.
A few days ago, the Sun not quite up, the fields had been hidden by waist-high mist. He’d been giving in to the illusion he lived atop a cloud when a flock of starlings burst out of the low-lying haze. The birds maneuvered like a single living thing, like a school of fish overhead—dark underwing against pallid blue instead of silver flanks flashing in underwater murk. Abrupt shifts in direction and astonishing ripple effects. He watched until the winged swarm disappeared over the hills.
Two bedrooms shared the porch’s view from another story up. He’d moved a desk and a chair into one. Antiques dragged out of an attic. He never sat at the desk. The drawers held nothing but the smell of aged paper. The room was otherwise bare. He rarely set foot in it.
If she would just show up.
It wasn’t that he wanted to be chased, hugged from behind. It was that it had to come from her. If it wasn’t her idea, if one of those emails wasn’t Hey, I’m here in the same Rip Van Winkle mountain range, let’s meet up, if he asked her to come, even hinted he wanted her to, she wouldn’t stay. They’d have a heavenly reunion, his heart circling the confines of his chest like a murmuration of starlings, but one day he’d come home and she’d be gone. Or they’d have another scene like the last time he saw her—he in his truck going one way, she in her car going another.

Reviews

Old Man Evil continually testifies to the precision and craft of Czyz’s writing, the gripping power of his vision. His imagination covers extensive geographic and historical territory, creating maps whose borders are drawn with the vigor of a nuanced moral temperament.
--Jeff Kahrs, The Arts Fuse